This week the State Services Commission bribed^Wbrought Rick Jelliffe over to New Zealand to be involved with an XML governance workshop they were running, and we were lucky enough to be included in his schedule because of some work we are currently doing with them.

Rick is a thorough geek, doing what he loves and getting pulled all over the world to do it, and we were lucky to be able to get a presentation to the NZOSS this evening giving his points of view about the readiness of the FOSS world to tar and feather him when he casually mentioned that Microsoft might be interested in paying him to provide some sanity to OpenXML discussions on Wikipedia.

It's an interesting tale of headline writers successively deciding that something is a 'bit bland' and sexing it up a little. Each person taking the previous headline and making it more inflammatory - even when the article content itself hadn't changed, which was based on the worst kind of Slashdot rant. A sad but frequent result of the general mass media bias towards 'exciting' news.

Humorously enough, Rick had previously edited his own Wikipedia page - normally a complete no-no, but since he didn't say anything contentious at that time it still remains. I was looking at it before I met him on Wednesday and noticed the talk page asking for a photo, so I took one and uploaded it today before his presentation.

I must finally admit, also, that Rick has convinced me that it is in the best interests of free software and of standards that this probably should be accepted, in spite of a number of valid technical criticisms.